This, Too
by gveret
Summary: A thousand years is a long time to not grow up. A thousand years is a long time to not remember. ("I like you, don't I?" said Simon. "I'm pretty sure. You look like I like you. Let's hang out.")


The first time it happened was only twenty-seven or eight years after the last time they shared a two-sided conversation. Only twenty-seven or eight years; not even long enough to grow out hair that reaches your heels. Not long enough to see the apple tree you planted bear fruit, but sure as hell long enough to forget everything that mattered to you and most of the things that didn't, too.

The first time it happened, Marceline had neither heel-length hair nor DIY fruit-bearing trees, and she no longer even had Hambo. She'd lost many shoelaces and more than one home and several familiar-smelling tees and all of her original blood cells, and she thought maybe she had some reasons to be cranky; but it was Simon who'd lost all the most important things, the ones inside his head.

He found her, maybe by chance and maybe by some incomprehensible, overly-convoluted design, but she didn't really think about it much at the time. He found her, and she didn't-sort-of-did want to be found, and she didn't-sort-of-did expect to be. He found her, and it was pretty damn clear that he hadn't at all been looking.

"Excuse me, mister, is this the Penguin Partisans Potluck?"

Marceline wasn't much of a mister, and nor was the mostly-dead, partly-sugarcoated rainforest she lived in really anything like a potluck-having location at all. But Simon was very blue and his hair was very white and too much of it came out of his face, and on top of his head his shitty magic crown looked as sticky and snug as that ring you don't even take off for the shower anymore. And Marceline wished very much that she couldn't recognize him like this, but she did.

"It's not," she informed him, and then, because he sighed and looked sad and muttered a dejected little "_oh_," she added, "But I have some leftover strawberry pie back at my place."

And because he grinned an awful spiky-toothed grin that was so damn painful in its giddiness and nodded in a way that was also giddy, Marceline led him home.

She floated through the forest above delicious fragile crystallized tree roots and large rainbow-sprinkled insects, and Simon floated right behind her.

She didn't think she could ever get used to this, this mutual floatation thing of theirs. The last time she saw him, he'd been very firmly the just-using-my-two-human-legs-to-safely-walk-along- on-solid-ground sort; he hadn't even been particularly fond of skipping. Now he was cold-shouldering the ground like it'd told him his beard was unfashionable. It was weird.

But there was something about his knees that was familiar – and that was weird also, since Simon had never worn shorts or anything like that. Knobby knees are just a Simon-like thing to have, she felt.

She didn't tell him that. It would've been awkward.

In fact, they made it all the way to Marceline's tree house without Marceline saying a single word, and also without Simon stopping saying them.

"I was sure the directions said to turn left when you feel cold cords of despair tug at your heart, but not before you pass by the giggling pond. I guess maybe I passed by the wrong giggling pond? I can never tell the difference between giggling ponds. They just all sound so alike, you know?"

"There's something very nice about the nighttime. It's almost as if you can hear the crickets making cricket noises. Except that you actually can!"

"No, I don't think these trees would be good for flooring, actually. I mean, you could probably lick food off the floor with them if it's food that goes well with caramel wood. Or you could just lick the floors, really. But it would invite a lot of ants. You don't need that many ants in a house."

"Ooh, is that the pie?"

Simon seemed generally enthusiastic about pie and people's places and being invited to them. He didn't even say anything about the pie being completely white or the place being a total dump or about the person being Marceline.

_Especially_ not about that last part.

"I tell you, there is nothing worse than rubber gloves in warm weather. Nothing worse."

Marceline bit the inside of her mouth, tasted blood and breathed an irritated sigh.

"Do you even remember me, Simon?" she blurted out.

Simon blinked, and smiled just the dopiest smile, and blinked again. Then he took off his crown, scratched his head, and stopped smiling.

"Oh," he said. "Marceline."

He laughed nervously.

"I knew you looked like a princess."

He stopped talking, then, and looked confused and guilty and almost as if he was willing to wrap a little apathy around himself for a little while, for comfort.

Marceline felt like the opposite of wanting to start singing for no particular reason. It was awful. The inside stitches of the pockets of her dress were very interesting suddenly, she thought, if only her damn eyes would deign to focus properly to observe them.

"I miss Betty," Simon confessed quietly, voice soft and weary but solid.

And Marceline almost reached out, almost rested her fingertips on his knobby knee, almost pressed a palm to his shoulder, almost gave his knuckles a squeeze. But she didn't.

Instead she said, "I know."

Back then, he still sometimes remembered his love's name.

.

By the second time it happened, Marceline's trees were all procreating steadily and her hair had already been thoroughly cut (the same could not be said for Simon's hair, quite tragically).

Marceline wasn't exactly moonbathing when it happened; she'd given up on moonbathing by then. The most it ever did for her was make her skin peel and flake off. Reflected sunlight does that to vampires, apparently, much the same way direct sunlight does it to pasty humans.

(She didn't know what exactly Simon was back then, but she supposed whether or not he was still human, at least he was still pasty. Although, he did look bluer and bluer every time she saw him, and that could count as some sort of evil icy magical tan, depending on your perspective.)

In any case, Marceline wasn't moonbathing the second time it happened. The second time it happened, she was simply passed out.

She woke up to an overdressed Simon poking her with a twig. She had a feeling he'd been doing it for a while.

"What?" she snapped, scowling.

"You looked like you were having a fun dream," he explained. "I wanted to know what about."

"You're an asshole," she informed him.

"What was your dream about?"

"I'm not telling you."

He squatted down beside her, twig still at the ready. His belly pressed against his thighs and spilled to either side. He looked very small. "Wanna do something fun with me?"

She snarled at him, a noncommittally bat-snake-spider thing blinking through her flesh. "What do you want from me?" she demanded, maybe a little too desperately.

He regarded her, unfazed, something absolute and opaque in his eyes. The twig hovered fearlessly closer to Marceline's cheek. She snapped it.

"I like you, don't I?" he said simply. "I'm pretty sure. You look like I like you. Let's hang out."

Marceline silently pressed a palm to her still vaguely rippling forehead and squeezed her eyes closed.

She imagined big, wobbly caverns made of snot inside his brain, slowly dripping onto his neurons and being all salty. Old memories might be like that for him, long stalactites of amorphous, heavily-processed goop that may have lost most of their original shape and function but are still damn hard to get completely rid of.

Or they might not, she supposed. That's just what she'd imagined, at that moment, and, being a vampire, of course her imagination would be a little gross.

He started poking her again with his now broken twig.

"Stop that, Simon!" she ordered.

And Simon said, "Okay."

Back then, he still sometimes remembered his own name.

.

By the third time it happened, Marceline was living in a really crappy cave but she was also kind of in love. It was nice.

She was alone when he came knocking, though. Well, there wasn't any knocking involved, actually, because Marceline was living in a cave at the time and Simon had developed rather terrible manners. But when he came barging in uninvited as if he'd been chased by a horde of carnivorous rhinos (which were totally extinct by that point and wouldn't have been that interested in his stringy flesh, anyway), Marceline was alone, in any case.

"Do you have any iced tea?" he'd politely inquired.

Marceline made him regular tea (he could ice it himself, dammit) in an old, long-ago drained mug, and herself indulged in a recently acquired fancy burgundy throw pillow. She watched with mild revulsion as Simon dropped two ice cubes right out of his fingertips and into his tea and proceeded to drink it.

"Lovely place you've got here," he commented.

"How do you keep finding me?" she demanded, tucking in her knees close to her chest and almost performing an accidental somersault. "I live in a cave now, for shleeps' sake."

Simon said nothing, and simply finished his tea. The half-melted ice cubes clinked against the china and each other, and Marceline absently wondered whether you could read a fortune in ice cubes. Maybe it was in the sounds.

"Say, Marceline."

"Yeah?"

"Have you ever really wanted to die?"

She looked at Simon then, he and his sharp teeth and sharper nose and the blue, blue bags under his eyes and his little finger sticking out, and she wanted to punch him, and she wanted to hug him, and she wanted to grab his stupid ugly-ass crown and heat it up until it's red and then drink it grey and brittle and empty.

But she didn't.

"Who, me?" she said instead, flippantly and with a flip of her hair. "_Nah_. I've wasted way enough time in the Nightosphere already. Trust me; total drag."

He stared at her smile, which she knew to be thoroughly pointy and charming (even though she hadn't been able to see its reflection in years), and he giggled, and he said, "Marcy, you're _so cool_."

Back then, he still sometimes remembered _her_ name.

.

By the fourth time it happened, they'd both gained royal titles but only he had a real castle. Maybe more importantly, though, the fourth time it happened, it was because Marceline had decided it was going to.

It'd taken her kind of a while, because sometimes Marceline just lost track of current events (and nothing stayed that current for long anyway, and she had her own shit going on, and rumors always seemed to regenerate and multiply endlessly like annoying little hydras, so why even bother), but eventually she heard about the new kingdom that had seemingly sprung out of nowhere one day and consisted of nothing but one blue dude and a whole bunch of penguins.

It wasn't really all that unusual, and Marceline had certainly seen her share of civilizations rise and fall through the years, some of them sillier and more unlikely than others. A one-man frozen kingdom wasn't even among the oddest, but she did know one man who wore a crown and was blue and liked ice a lot, and so she decided she might as well ask around.

"He's blue," told her the talking toadstool down at Three Goated Valley, where there are only four goats (although Sandy is pregnant again). "And ugly. But I guess the penguins like him, 'cause it's been a few weeks and no mutiny yet."

"He's an idiot," explained Darren the Deer Lord out in the Barbecue Marshes. "I've heard he steals food from the dirt dwarves instead of taking advantage of all that game he's got waddling around. Apparently he didn't even instate a tax system. Not a very promising start to a monarchy, if you ask me."

"He kidnapped my sister last week," grumbled Tea Princess back at his shop. "She said his holding cells leave a lot to be desired. _And_ the tea was lukewarm."

Marceline still wasn't completely certain this king was Simon, and she wasn't completely certain she wanted to do anything about it either way. She wasn't completely certain, but she was fairly certain, and that was probably enough.

The Ice Kingdom was very far away from Marceline's current residence in the valley between the two Itching Mountains, pretty but humid. But Marceline had been sort of magic, she supposed, for a long while now and could fly and poof in and out of places sometimes, and so it didn't take her all that long to get there. Which was good, because she didn't have time to change her mind, and which was bad for mostly the same reason.

It was funny how, even though the huge ice castle at the centre of the Ice Kingdom was so imposing and so huge, it also had a front door. Not double stone gates with brass knockers shaped like roaring dragon heads. A front door, like a regular Earth house in the ancient suburbs would have. It was something that looked compatible with knocking (maybe exclusively), so Marceline knocked.

The person who opened the door for her had a beard that could be used to incubate a half dozen penguin eggs, a nose that could be used to pick its own nostrils, and a crown that _should_ be used to make a thousand tiny gold leaves that old people will attach to tacky pottery projects and forget all about.

Marceline ground her fangs together and reminded herself not to cry.

"Who are you?" the man asked, looking suspicious and a bit drowsy.

"Hi," said Marceline and offered him a little wave. "I'm Marceline, the Vampire Queen."

He brightened up instantly, his back straightening and his lips stretching and his voice rising and falling in slightly strained excitement.

"And I'm Ice King, the, uh, Ice King!" he said. "Let me tell you a little bit about myself. So my name's Ice King and I live in a castle – real estate values in this area have really been soaring, by the way – and I have penguins. Oh! I should totally introduce you to Gunter. Gunter! Come over here, you lazy bird. Sorry, he's probably sleeping inside or on top of something again. He's like that sometimes. He can't even fly, you know."

He led her deeper into his ridiculous gigantic icy home as he talked. Marceline glanced at the fragmented, translucent, dense pillars of ice, the eclectic, useless trinkets seemingly collected from a hundred unconnected cultures, the piles of penguin droppings in every corner, the far too numerous iron bars strewn around in conspicuous groups. She glanced at his smile, which was nothing like anything she remembered, and at his eyes, which were still the same color.

"It's pretty great, being an ice king, you know?" he said, his smile even larger and harsher and more unconstrained.

"You're not Ice King, the Ice King," she wanted to tell him.

"You're Simon Petrikov, the Human Guy," she wanted to say.

"Just Simon. _My_ Simon," she wanted to shout.

But she didn't.

"Yeah," she said instead. "I figured."

Back then, he'd already forgotten most everything about himself that she had felt was important to hold on to. And back then and ever after, she held onto it still, because Marceline's always loved Simon, when he was Simon and also once he was not.


End file.
